This two-volume feast of an anthology celebrates the rich tradition of the French short story. Spanning four centuries, its pages brim with decadent tales, ‘bloody tales’ and fairy tales, detective stories and war stories, the experimental and the existential. These are stories about the self and the other, the fantastic and the realist, the country and the city, the nation and the colony, told in an eclectic array of voices and styles.

The collection features the most famous writers across the Francophone world, from Voltaire to Simone de Beauvoir, as well as rare treasures and contemporary writers like Marie Ndiaye and Virginie Despentes, some of them translated for the first time here. By turns playful and profound, sublime and absurd, this first volume takes the reader from the sixteenth century to the glorious ‘golden age’ of the fin de siecle.

Edited and with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness, academic, writer and translator.